HISTORIC HUB HOTEL CLOSES
Hotel Buckminster cancels ‘all existing reservations’ due to COVID pandemic
A century of Boston’s cultural history in the course of a changing Kenmore Square has come to an end with the closing of one of the city’s most storied hotels due to COVID-19.
In a post on its Facebook page, the Hotel Buckminster on Beacon Street announced that it suspended all operations as of March 20 to protect the well-being of its guests and staff in response to guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state officials.
Hotel Manager Trina Nolan said: “We will be cancelling all existing reservations moving forward. We do not have plans of reopening in the future at this point in time. We thank you for your patronage.”
It was unclear whether the hotel’s restaurant, the Fenmore Grill, will also close permanently. There was no answer Tuesday at its phone number.
According to the Hotel Buckminster’s website, the hotel was where the Black Sox scandal all began, a Major League Baseball gamefixing scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate.
The Hotel Buckminster was designed by Winslow and Wetherall, the successor architectural firm to Bradlee, Winslow and Wetherall, said Anthony M. Sammarco, author of the forthcoming book “Kenmore Square and The Fenway Through Time,” due out next year.
Former Mayor Raymond Flynn remembers selling the Record American, one of six newspapers in Boston at the time, for 3 cents to hotel guests as they left to go to games at Fenway Park in about 1950, when he was 10 years old.
“It was very stately; it wasn’t like a modern hotel,” Flynn said. “It had wood carving and nice paintings, like an old Yankee place that made Boston look good.”
At the end of his shift, Flynn said the bartender would give he and other newspaper boys a ride home.
The hotel was built in 1897 and until the 1920s was the largest building in the Muddy River area just past the Back Bay in an area that was known as Governor’s Square, the junction of Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue, Sammarco said.
In the ’20s, the hotel had a huge neon sign on its roof advertising White Fuel, much like the present Citgo sign, he said.
A decade later, Sammarco said, Howard Johnson’s had a restaurant on the ground floor with a large neon sign of its logo, “Simple Simon and the Pieman,” above the entrance.
From 1929 well into the 1950s, he said, WNAC Radio broadcast from a studio in the Hotel Buckminster’s basement.
During World War II, a portion of the hotel housed Italian prisoners of war, Sammarco said.
In 1950, the popular jazz nightclub Storyville moved from the Copley Square Hotel to the Buckminster, where jazz legends Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan performed.
Over the years, famous guests at the Hotel Buckminster included Babe Ruth and Andy Kaufman, who lived at the hotel for an extended period of time, according to its website.